By Karl Williams · August 14, 2023
When you think about the past six Best Picture Oscar winners in a row, do you notice a pattern? (I’ll give you a hint: it has to do with their protagonists.) Each of these films features protagonists that could be considered a working-class hero. Think about it. The Shape of Water — janitor. CODA — commercial fisherman. Everything Everywhere All at Once — laundromat owner.
Let’s take a look at how the working-class hero protagonist shows up in those recent six Best Picture winners — as well as four others from recent years that prominently feature characters that “work for a living.”
Scripts from this Article
The Shape Of Water
Sorry To Bother You
Green Book
Parasite
Nomadland
Minari
Maid
CODA
The Bear
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Found on the banks of a river as an infant, Elisa Esposito (her last name means “exposed”) works as a custodian at a top-secret government facility. Lacking power and authority, she hatches a complex plan to free an amphibious creature from captivity, “exposing” her own true nature in the process.
Read More: How The Shape of Water Teaches Filmmakers About Acceptance
Cash Green (this name, I mean come on) takes a job as a telemarketer out of desperation and soon learns the trick of succeeding in this low-rent role: pretending to be someone you’re not. In other words: white. Issues of race and class enrich, like green cash (!), the themes of this satire. Cash is the least “working-class hero” of all the characters I included here (he doesn’t labor and his job isn’t industrial) but his work is extremely “entry-level.”
Loosely based on a real person, Tony Lip is a bouncer who temporarily becomes a driver (I suspect he would punch anyone who uses the word “chauffeur” right in the face) for a brilliant Black pianist. Tony is very, uh, “hands-on,” and his manual skills come in handy repeatedly.
Ki-woo is a con artist: a fake tutor and part-time pizza box folder who gets his father a gig as a fake driver with the same wealthy, entitled clan that soon his entire family is scamming. Their heart-breaking economic anxiety — and the sickening presence of rival swindlers who are equally desperate — leads to tragedy for everyone involved.
Read More: 5 Plot Point Breakdown: Parasite
Closely based on a true story, this grim drama (based on a non-fiction book) follows the journey of Fern, a widow who loses her longtime job at a gypsum plant and is forced to become an itinerant laborer following seasonal gigs around the United States that barely pay a subsistence wage. Pride — and perhaps a stubborn refusal to accept her situation — leads Fern to pass up opportunities to live a better life, all of them with the caveat of becoming dependent on benefactors. Filmed on location with several of the book’s real-life “characters” appearing as themselves.
Newly implanted (thank you, I humbly bow) on a farm in rural Arkansas, Jacob Yi’s dream is to start a farm growing Korean vegetables. From locating a durable water source to dealing with hazards like a barn fire, Jacob’s journey is fraught with the challenges of agricultural work as well as all the pitfalls of a small business startup. Gigging on the side sexing chicks (an actual job), worrying about his ailing son’s health care and dealing with local bureaucracy, this drama set in the 1980s could just as easily be set in 2023.
Starting from rock bottom (escape from an abusive relationship and into a shelter), single Seattle mother Alex takes work as a house cleaner, trying to build a new life and navigating the complexities of a custody battle and social services while dreaming of attending college to become a writer. Maid magnifies many aspects of the “poor tax” premium that working-class people such as Alex are often forced to pay — from her daughter’s unsafe day care, to unreliable transportation, to housing instability.
Just like Alex in Maid, Ruby Rossi in CODA is another protagonist with artistic dreams blocked by her working-class environment. The only member of her commercial fishing family that isn’t deaf, Ruby is essential to their operations (laws dictate that one crew member must be able to hear). A talented singer, Ruby learns of a potential music scholarship at the same time her family, tired of being taken advantage of economically, sets out to take their business independent — now needing her more than ever.
Although protagonist Carmy Berzatto is an award-winning chef who has worked at high-end gourmet restaurants like The French Laundry, this comedy-drama series follows his career path back to his family’s sandwich shop in Chicago, where his talents are useful — but where he has also essentially become a working-class cook in a failing fast-food enterprise. The Bear captures the atmosphere and tension of the culinary world with such accuracy that I have more than one friend with traumatic food service experience that cannot watch it.
Laundromat owner Evelyn Wang is depressed: her struggling small family business faces an IRS audit and her husband is trying to find the right moment to serve her with divorce papers. She’s on the brink of just giving up when she begins jumping through alternate universes and encountering other versions of herself, discovering that her reality is the least successful — but also finding a path back to her life and business that leaves her with newfound hope.
Read More: The Hero’s Journey: Everything Everywhere All at Once
Sorry to Bother You (2018)
Ultimately, the “working-class hero” trend is just that (a trend, just as it’s always been before), and audiences will soon return to larger-than-life, never-out-of-style heroes like royalty, geniuses, cops and criminal kingpins, but if you’re going down the working-class road with your protagonist, here are a couple of quick tips:
Read More: Great Protagonists – Ultimate Underdogs
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Karl Williams is a screenwriting instructor at Scottsdale Community College in Arizona, blogs about screenwriting, and co-hosts the screenwriting advice podcast Get Your Story Straight. He is not a working-class hero, but he has washed dishes, mopped floors, scrubbed toilets, collected trash, flipped burgers and still wears a lot of hats.
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